I don’t know if anyone but me reads comic strips anymore, but here are my thoughts on a few I follow:

Pooch Café: Bill Watterson once called Pogo “the last of the enjoy the ride strips,” by which he meant that while it often had continuing storylines, the point wasn’t to get to the end but to see how many enjoyable tangents you could take along the way. (Mid-series episodes of The Simpsons are a good example of this as well.) Pooch Café has a lot of this quality to it, with stories often making vertiginous twists and ending up in much odder and funnier places than you might have imagined from the beginning. I can’t say for sure, but I’d like to think that Paul Gilligan, the writer/artist, just lets the stories run in whatever direction they like the way Walt Kelly did.

Zits: The subject matter may not be particularly unusual (though it’s done in a more original way than any other “teen” strip) but Zits is one of the few strips today that is actually doing interesting things with art. Bill Watterson (again) famously dismissed a lot of comic strips as being (I’m paraphrasing) “Xeroxed characters standing talking to one another,” and for the most part that’s true today — almost literally true, since many strips make use of scanned images of their characters that are used over and over in slightly different poses (Shoe has been done this way since Jeff MacNelly’s death, something I hope has him turning in his grave.) Zits, on the other hand, often makes the art a key part of the action, in strips like this one. Not the greatest gag in the world, to be sure, but compare it to a typical strip in the same paper. Here’s a test: cover the bottom third of each of these two strips. Which one is still (vaguely) funny? Tip to cartoonists: comic strips are not supposed to be funny without the art.

Mutts: Okay, after praising two strips I’m going to get mean. But how can you be mean to Mutts? It’s so charming, so cute, so lovable. And I do love Mutts. I think that Patrick McDonnell is one of the best artists working in any medium today. So what’s the problem? He’s coasting. I may say that in part because I usually read it online, so I don’t get to see the creative things he does with the Sunday strips, but even still the strips have a disquieting sameness. If you are a Mutts fan, as I am, try to think of a particularly good one from the last few years. Of course, they’re all good; they’re all fine… but none are really better than the others, or different from the others in any way. It’s as though McDonnell had an endless bag full of strips, from which he drew one at random every day. So while McDonnell is probably a better artist than Jim Borgman, who draws Zits, and each individual Mutts strip is usually better than each Zits, I find myself more interested in reading Zits.

Doonesbury: Speaking of coasting… Like a few other things I read Doonesbury out of habit, and I wonder if Garry Trudeau might be drawing it out of habit as well. The characters marry, procreate, get old… it’s like Gasoline Alley for liberals, or an inside-the-beltway version of For Better or For Worse. I also wonder if Trudeau, like Tom Lehrer, might just not find the news funny anymore: politics seems to be receding further and further into the background for the last while. Obama, for instance, has barely been a blip — the only appearance I can remember was in a series of fourth-wall-breaking strips about him learning how to be in Doonesbury.

Fisher: I’m getting really obscure here, as I think this strip is only published in the Globe and Mail, but what the heck. What I find interesting about this strip is not necessarily the content (though it is usually fairly funny) but that it takes the same approach to young-ish urban married life that Dilbert took to offices. A lot of comic-strip mavens have expressed bafflement at the success of Dilbert, pointing out its crude art and fairly uncreative gag-a-day structure. What these critics miss, in my view, is that the appeal of Dilbert is not primarily its humour or its art but its relevance: rather than being set in the sitcom never-never land of Blondie or Hi and Lois or any number of other worthless comics, it’s set in something with a recognizable connection to real life. Scott Adams has said that most of the crazy stuff he showed going on in offices (tethering laptops, for instance) was based on things that had happened to himself or his readers, and Fisher has very much the same feeling. Like Dilbert, it may not be the funniest strip out there, but it may be the most clippable.

I’ve been reading Doonesbury for nearly thirty years, and I don’t think Trudeau’s coasting. He has in the past, but he’s taken on the Family/C Street Center recently, and he’s talking more about the Iraq war and its homefront effects than pretty much anyone else.

But you’re right about Mutts. When I first discovered it, I loved it, but it’s been years since I’ve seen anything there I haven’t seen before. As far as conventional mainstream strips go, it’s Get Fuzzy and Pearls Before Swine that keep me interested (though not generally for the art in the case of the latter).

(Fisher is still going? I liked it, but haven’t read the G&M in years….)

While I agree about Zits art–comparatively to other newspaper strips, anyway–that strip forfeited all my good will towards it after only the second year in syndication: it started with great potential and even delved into some hot teenage dramaz in the first year, and then quickly relied on cheap gags on suburban parent-douchey kid miscommunication that seems like Scott and Borgman are on sabbatical and just reprinting old material. I’m obviously not arguing that Zits needs to Gossip-Girl it up or access some of that crazy teen shit, but I’d like some more development and heck plot with Jeremy and his high school cohorts rather than just Jeremy and his parents. Yet again.

Also, re: Fisher: while I concede that relevance is important, there are some comics that coast by on its “oh my god, it’s so true!!” appeal rather than it actually being a well written, well structured strip. For more, see: Retail.

Nice to see some love for Pooch Cafe; any strip that does a gag featuring a mailman dressed as Galactus gets my attention.( And if Trudeau’s doing less political stuff these days, it may just be that American politics has become too vile for him to have fun with anymore- or maybe he’s just ceded ground to his successors on DAILY SHOW and COLBERT…)

This comment I don’t understand:
“I may say that in part because I usually read it online, so I don’t get to see the creative things he does with the Sunday strips”

How does reading online keep you from seeing the Sunday strips? Every online source I`ve seen includes Sundays, and if anything always includes the top panel by the titles that some papers remove for space.

I’ll agree that the current Doonesbury storyline isn’t grabbing me, but I think there’s a difference between a bad storyline and a bad strip. I’m willing to be patient; after all, it’s not like it’s a tremendous time commitment to read the strip.

For my money, by the way, no strip should be allowed to outlive its original creator; thus ‘Shoe’, ‘B.C.’, ‘The Wizard of Id’, ‘Dennis the Menace’ (which was actually a great strip, once upon a time in the 50s), ‘Peanuts’, ‘Blondie’, and probably lots of others I’m missing (including probably all the soap opera strips) should all gently shuffle off the funny pages and be collected in book form, to be replaced by new comics from younger cartoonists.

The other thing that made Pogo an “enjoy the ride” strip was that it didn’t really have punchlines, or at least didn’t always have them; each panel had its own gags.

I remember being disoriented as a kid encountering Pogo and Li’l Abner because they didn’t have the gag structure I was familiar with from most strips (including even Calvin and Hobbes), where the first three panels lead up to a payoff in the last panel.

I do think Pooch Cafe has some of that style, where there’s a bunch of little gags sprinkled throughout the strip instead of one overall gag.

Excepting FISHER (which I haven’t seen yet), I’m pretty much onboard with all your other comments. Charm goes a looooooooooong way on MUTTS, but it gets the job done.

I will disagree re a cartoonist always having to be funny artistically as well as in the writing. Sometimes all the strip has to do is set up the punchline by showing who’s talking, other times it has to be instrumental to the finished effect. A typical MR. BOFFO, f’r instance, is rarely that humorous without the caption & dialog, yet I’d rank it among the funniest strips out there (and it is “out there”…).

Just curious: Any love for ZIPPY THE PINHEAD? I’d argue it’s the best drawn strip out there, though I concede ZITS and a few others are almost as good.

“For my money, by the way, no strip should be allowed to outlive its original creator”

I’d agree if not for my childhood love of the Phantom strips I read in the 90s. I’m not really sure who wrote them but – considering the age of the character – I highly doubt it was the original creator.

Besides, isn’t the general consensus that BC actually got funny again after the creator died and took most of the heavy-handed born-again Christian stuff with him so that his family could go back to telling the goofy stories about cavemen that originally made the strip a success?

Not that I’ve heard–the Comics Curmudgeon singles out the rewritten strips as being painfully unfunny, almost Dadaesque in the way that they attach new dialogue to old art and make something that’s confusing and dull all at the same time.

@Razelore: I’d never seen Lio before you mentioned it, but it’s very cute and quite funny. I may bookmark it.

To all Pearls Before Swine fans — I think it’s OK, I just had nothing interesting to say about it. (I’m also unjustly hard on it because the very first PBS strip I ever read remains the funniest, and indeed the only one I’ve ever read that actually made me laugh out loud.)Likewise for Get Fuzzy, though it has better art.

@Ed/Jack: I read the comics through the Toronto Star site, so I don’t see the title frame, which is where McDonnell gets creative. I should probably bookmark the Mutts home page but I’m too lazy.

@Buzz: I don’t insist that the art be funny by itself, but that a strip shouldn’t be funny _without_ the art.